Are You Kidding?

This guy is making the case that fast food joints comprise the "new face of American manufacturing", and that it's a good thing.  Seriously, are you fucking kidding me?

Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you'll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald's (MCD), Wendy's (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: "I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day."

So OK, let's make sure we're doing everything we can do to study and improve methods for efficiency and throughput etc, but let's at least acknowledge that we're talking about  assembling a burrito and not a car or a vacuum cleaner or a toaster;  and we need to understand that while there's dignity in all work, it's not cool to consider a job at Taco Bell making chimichangas to be the same as a job at Suzlon building windmills.

Do you not get the feeling that we're being set up for something?